Reporter

In rebel Syria, a race to save precious property deeds | AFP

Beirut (AFP) – The external hard drive had been smuggled from Syrian regime territory through jihadist-held towns and into Turkey. When Ghazwan Koronful finally got his hands on it, he sighed in relief.

Loaded onto the disk were pictures of thousands of title deeds from towns in central Syria recently recaptured by government troops and largely emptied of their residents.

Fearing Syria’s regime would expropriate abandoned properties or tamper with deeds, a network of activists and lawyers set their covert plan into motion.

“It was our most complex operation yet,” said Koronful, a 65-year-old Syrian lawyer who heads the network from Turkey, where he has lived in exile since 2012.

For nearly five years, Koronful’s Free Syrian Lawyers (FSL) have been working to preserve property deeds and other civil paperwork in Syria’s opposition areas.

They enter town registries, photograph the documents, carefully log and organise them, then smuggle the hard drives across Syria’s sealed northern border into Turkey.

Each month, they emptied their computers onto external drives which they sent to Koronful in Turkey.

They raced against air strikes that damaged cameras and wounded staff members, worrying registries would be bombed to pieces before they could finish.

“When we reached the last page, we’d be so happy to be finished. Whatever happens now, if we get bombed, we have a drive with everything on it,” said Samer.

Sometimes they lost the race. In 2013, days before FSL was to begin photographing deeds in the northern town of Al-Bab, the Islamic State group swept in and destroyed the registry, Koronful said.

They now struggle to get permission to enter registries from suspicious rebels, especially in jihadist-run Idlib, occasionally photographing in secret.

– A chance to return –

Since Syria’s war erupted in 2011, more than six million people have been internally displaced and another five million have fled the country.

More than 920,000 have been displaced this year alone, the UN said, the fastest rate yet in the seven-year war.

A vast majority leave behind property-related papers, the Norwegian Refugee Council found in polls last year.

That puts them at risk of losing access to their land through decrees like Law 10, which allows for property expropriation for urban development.

Koronful fears the regime could also dispossess refugees through legislation on re-issuing damaged deeds.

A set of laws allows for missing titles to be restituted using digital copies, but it remains unclear if the government would accept a version produced by opposition-affiliated lawyers.

“We’re expecting a lot of people to ask for copies,” said The Day After’s Amr Shannan, pointing to similar post-conflict property disputes in Lebanon and Bosnia as precedents.

For now, the digital titles remain tucked away on a pair of hard drives, one in Turkey and another in an undisclosed European city. They aren’t yet searchable, but are archived in the same order as the originals.

“If there’s going to be a return of refugees, one of the most important factors is that they have homes or land to return to,” said Shannan.